


Lacunae

by kenaz



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Community: thestopwatch, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-30
Updated: 2008-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-09 20:53:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenaz/pseuds/kenaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's quite a bit that Jack has forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lacunae

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amyross](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Amyross).



The door to the cell slid home with a satisfying clack, stone and perspex walls muting the groans of the Weevils that were already shrugging off the effects of sedation.

  
"Well, then," Ianto began, mounting the stairs at Jack's heel, a spring coiled with hopeful anticipation Jack didn't have the heart to reciprocate, "the streets of Splott are once again safe for yobs and blighters, and--" he glanced at his watch "--all before the stroke of midnight."

  
"So, er...interested in a bite?" Brow furrowed and one hand raking back through his hair, he looked too young by half in the sterile blue glow of the monitors. He held up the keys to the SUV and jangled them in enticement. "Curry Palace is open late."

  
A beat passed, and then another, and Jack watched him tuck his hope away behind a stoic mask before answering. "Thanks, but no thanks. Another time."

  
Jack smiled peremptorily to soften the blow of his refusal, but Ianto's disappointment was palpable despite the stillness of his shoulders and the unwillingness of his features to give even a fraction of an inch. Jack had lately become somewhat of a connoisseur when it came to interpreting the subtleties of Ianto's disappointment; he didn't relish the skill.

  
"C'mon." He took the keys from Ianto's hand and canted his head toward the cog door. "I'll drive you home."

* * *

  
Ianto had watched him, concern barely winning out over alarm, climb into the SUV and pause with one hand lingering above the gearshift, the other above the steering column, eyes rapidly blinking as he forced his mind to supply the missing information relating to the task at hand. He tried not think about the look of dismay-- and worse, pity-- on Gwen's face the very first time he had slipped into the driver's seat and simply couldn't bring up the correct sequence of turning the key, engaging the engine, and toeing the pedal. After punching the dash and cursing, he had ordered her to drive. Tonight, at least, it came to him readily enough, though he had needed Ianto to remind him how, exactly, to get to Llandaff North.

  
By now, most of the gaps had closed; the voids where muscle memory didn't quite align with cognition had narrowed to the point where he could convincingly fake his way through a day. The mundane trivialities of daily life, the banal exercises of existence-- eating, drinking, pissing, speaking English, knowing where he kept his shirts, knowing how to boil an egg-- all that was there, seemingly untouched. Which was a good thing, because God knows it would have driven Gwen to tears if she had ever found him in the kitchenette staring in befuddlement at a fork. He smirked a little, not unkindly, at the mental image and said a quick thank you to the universe that his sense of humor had emerged at least partially intact, though at present it was a little heavy on gallows fare, light on the slapstick. That said, he could still remember most of the dialogue from a Marx Brothers film he had seen in 1935. Strange, what the mind chose to claim and what to jettison. Loading his Webley took him a few seconds longer than it once had; Gwen's anxious smile when he had to keep his eyes on the piece while feeding the slugs into the cylinders told him as much. Firing it, however-- that was something that never left him; the ability to aim and pull the trigger was as automatic as breathing, a fact that bothered him less than he thought it should, as if at his most elemental he was nothing more than a wise-cracking assassin, and he was OK with that.

  
The universe had infinite ways to punish hubris, not the least of which was to taunt Jack with the understanding that he couldn't gain back lost time through sheer force of will. Gaping chasms between the old past and the present, between the present and the pasts yet to come, remained unbridged. A tantalizing tickle on the edge of consciousness hinted at what had been there, but replayed it in shadow, the angle and perspective all wrong. It wasn't the same as having his memory _wiped_, as the Time Agency had done-- something he had only very recently recalled. He had nearly laughed when he considered the futility of remembering _that_ he had forgotten, when he had no idea _what_ he had forgotten. But losing two years to the Agency-- it was two years, wasn't it?-- that was a pittance compared to trying to dredge up a protracted lifetime, trying to link centuries and galaxies and identities. Two years? Hell, he'd have given 'em twenty if he could just have the rest of it back. It was like working a jigsaw puzzle in the dark: the pieces were awkward in his hands, and he touched every edge a hundred times before he could fit two pieces together, and thousands of pieces later, he still couldn't see the picture he was making.

  
He might never get it all back, and it was out of his control. So many things were. That was something he understood now more than ever before, and the despair that accompanied that bitter truth would have been enough to drown him centuries ago, if the dirt hadn't been there to do it first. So he was careful to mind the gaps, careful not to tumble headlong into the torment of amnesia, because if he truly stopped to think about how fucking much he had forgotten-- the names and the faces and the days and the nights, the things he had seen and done, and the experience of loving people, or of hating them, or of missing them-- he would lose his mind completely.

  
In the liminal space between living and dying there had been room only for pain and panic and time only to think of Gray. He had paid his penance in the currency of gravel in his lungs, in trees that forced their roots through his ribs, in the slow depredation of insects. Gray's was the only name in his mind, the only word his lips could form beyond the first scream of awakening. After Gray, there was no other sound in the dirt beyond his own choking and the occasional residual echo in his mind of his mother's voice, desperate and tinged with accusation, speaking in a tongue that would not even exist for thousands of years: _Where's Gray? Where is he, son?_

  
And that, that was what he could not tell Ianto, why he could not don the Harkness smile and go for rogan josh at Curry Palace and then fuck him hard enough to bend the frame of the camp bed: He had forgotten. He had forgotten Ianto, he had forgotten Gwen, he had forgotten Torchwood, he had forgotten _everything_ except his brother's name and his mother's voice in all that time. He came back thinking of Gray, and nothing else mattered.

  
The rhythmic clench and release of his jaw helped keep him focused on the road beyond the windscreen. Street lamps threw regular splotches of jaundiced light over parked cars and sidewalks, and eventually Ianto pointed out the sign for Hazelhurst Road. He swung the SUV in a tight turn, narrowly skirting the ineptly parked Citroen jutting out from the kerb, and left the engine idling in front of number 39.

"Where were you, Jack?" Ianto asked, as if he hadn't noticed he was home. The baritone rumble of his voice carried on a frequency not dissimilar to that of the engine. "Where do you go when you look like that?"

The genuine concern he heard, and the knowledge that Ianto was honestly asking for Jack's sake and not his own, almost lured Jack to speech. But he couldn't do it, not tonight, anyway. Even a liberal application of Captain Jack's patented charm and finesse couldn't turn _'when I finally climbed out of cold storage, I had no idea who you were'_ into an icebreaker.

  
He forced a grin, but only half his mouth responded and he wondered if it didn't look more like a grimace. "Oh, everywhere... nowhere."

  
Now would be a good time for a distraction, like one of his ridiculous stories. The problem was, he still couldn't remember many of them. The ones he did-- finding himself naked on 2001st century satellite tv with a couple of gynoids who thought he'd look better without his chiseled jaw and his refined nose, and his... well, without his entire head, actually, and fending them off with a gun he'd kept clenched between his-- suffice it to say, the ones he remembered now didn't really suit the mood of the moment.

  
"Feel free to come in late tomorrow," he offered breezily. "Catch a few more hours of sleep." As a sop to Ianto's pride, it was relatively worthless. He knew full well what Ianto was hoping he would say-- _hey, mind if I invite myself in?_\-- but he didn't say it, leaving Ianto to cross the awkward gulf between them on his own.

  
"Come up... just for a bit?"

  
He didn't look at Jack when he asked, choosing instead to pointedly inspect the cuticle of his thumb.

  
The normalcy of open space and a comfortable bed, of windows that looked out over ordinary scenes of suburban street and garden, was jarring compared with his monastic cave in the Hub's core, his dark den in perpetual proximity to the electric chatter of computers and the chthonic songs of water deep beneath the Plass. But he didn't want to have to tell Ianto he didn't remember where his loo was, let alone what his bedroom looked like, or anything they had ever done in it.

  
"Another night."

  
His hand tightened slightly on the gear shift when it appeared that Ianto was going to press the issue, but he seemed to think better of it, closing his mouth and responding merely with a curt nod: Jack's good soldier.

  
"Right. Ok."

  
As he opened the door and turned away, Jack caught a glimpse of his face reflected in the windscreen and the hurt there, the bewildered loneliness of a man who thought he was being punished and couldn't understand the reason for it, and it made his breath catch in his chest.

  
"Ianto." Some misguided reflex tightened his throat around the name.

  
Ianto turned and leaned over the seat to press into him, his hand cool against Jack's cheek before they kissed. Jack could almost feel the word 'please' in every sweep of Ianto's tongue, and he briefly reconsidered. The motor trundled evenly beneath the bonnet, but all else around them was quiet, save for the groaning of the leather seats as they shifted, the whispers of breath against breath, the soft, wet noises of moving lips. He wondered, as he pulled away, if it were possible to taste sadness, because he sure as hell thought that's what Ianto tasted like tonight, sadness and exhaustion that reached the bone. It tasted like... like earth, he decided. He wondered if Ianto could taste the same on him.

  
"I'm sorry," he said quietly, his thumb rubbing a soft circle against the back of Ianto's neck. "I just..."

  
"... _Dim problem_," Ianto brushed off the apology with a small, tight smile. "See you in the morning." He nudged the door open again with his foot and then headed up the walk without a backward glance.

  
He waited until he saw the light in Ianto's flat flick on before shifting out of neutral.

  
* * *

Jack didn't sleep, much.

Hadn't really needed to since he came back on the Gamestation, though it had been as good as or better than casual sex and drugs and drink to give him a momentary reprieve from eternity. It broke up an endless life into slightly more palatable portions. Over time, his vices had dwindled to sex of the less-casual variety, the occasional tumbler of top-shelf Scotch or a glass of really good Cabernet, and sleep.

But his camp bed was barely adequate for one and not particularly comfortable under the best of circumstances. It wasn't supposed to be. For decades, it had served as a nightly reminder that his stay at Torchwood was temporary; he needed to be ready to go at any time. He had thought of himself as merely a placeholder, a visitor. Long-term, perhaps-- longer than an average man's lifetime, even-- but a visitor nonetheless. He had returned to Cardiff from a year that hadn't happened resolved to stay there, but the camp bed remained, a souvenir of sorts. Now it had begun to feel more like a tomb, and he had had enough of tombs to last a thousand lifetimes. Still, he wasn't ready to be comfortable. Aches and stiff limbs, starting the day alone, these were atonement of a sort: because he could wake, he must wake. So many others couldn't, and he had often been an architect in that, through inaction or wrong action or bad timing; by design or by chance. Ascetic surroundings did nothing if not remind him that all comfort was transitory at best: anything could be lost, and lost at any time.

  
The nights he spent on it he dreamed violently and could not quite tell if the dreams were figments of his imagination or memories returning. He dreamed that Gray embraced him, then ran a knife through his gut. He dreamed that he held Tosh in his arms as she bled out all over the floor. Their afterimage clung to him like sweat, clammy and stale. Those that haunted him at noon, he filed away as memories; the ones that dissipated by the time he reached the shower, or finished his first mug of coffee, he classified as fiction. Hoped they were, anyway.

  
And they weren't _all_ bad. There was the one where Ianto had appeared in his quarters wearing nothing but a UNIT cap and a smile. He wouldn't have minded having that one again a time or two. Or three.

Sometimes he tried dozing on the couch or simply sprawled there, lulled by the white noise of the mainframe and the water sluicing down the tower. It was lumpy and uneven and gave off a faint whiff of old takeaway, and he remembered Owen asking why they couldn't requisition furniture that didn't look and smell like it came from Oxfam's reject bin. Yet no one had taken it upon themselves to replace it. He considered moving into one of the basements, but then he remembered Lisa Hallett, and putting his gun to Ianto's head and how close, how fucking close, he had been to pulling the trigger-- why couldn't that have been one of the blanks his brain hadn't filled in?-- and he knew he could never ask Ianto to come there. Nor did he imagine either of them wanted to be too close to the morgue. The Hub was full of ghosts.

  
But tonight, the couch was as good a place to be as any. Myfanwy swooped in low and circled the tower, the reflection of her broad, cumbersome wings on the shining surface mottled by the water, and Jack imagined that, awkwardly as she moved, there had been a time and a place where she had been a beauty, a queen of the skies.

  
"You're even farther from home than I am, you know," he said, not loudly enough for her to hear, even if she could have understood him. "You may be the only one who is. Except for the Doctor," he mused. Myfanwy squawked. "Yeah, you're right. He doesn't count."

  
She taxied over the Rift pool in a futile search for fish, eventually withdrawing to her nest, making plaintive noises that carried through the empty Hub. She sounded as if she were mourning, and Jack paused to wonder if her reptilian brain had the capacity for grief as humans understood it. He scaled up the ladder to her roost, ignoring the ripe smell of guano. When she didn't flinch from him, he tentatively stroked the cool, smooth skin of her head.

  
"We're not so very different, you and I. Both of us ancient, out of time. The only ones of our kind," he confided, crooning in a low voice he imagined she found soothing. Humans did; why not a pterodactyl?

  
_Pterandon_, an absent voice corrected.

  
Myfanwy nipped and made a clicking noise in her throat. "Watch the beak," he scolded, but soon reached up to pet her again. She nipped harder the second time, leaving a scored red line across the back of his hand.

  
"Ouch!" He barked out a laugh, shame-faced and a bit surprised. "I thought we were having a _moment_ here," he chided. "Don't bite the hand that signs the paycheck of the hand that feeds."

It took a few minutes to climb down, fetch the meat from the freezer, track down the bottle of enzyme sauce and scale the ladder one-handed. He tossed her an extra slab, more than a little embarrassed at being called out on his brooding by a dinosaur. She choked them down whole, her beak clacking with each convulsion of her throat, and then turned away, ignoring him completely in favor of grooming her sated belly.

"Where's the love?"

He told himself as he dropped back down the ladder and retreated to the couch that the question was rhetorical, but an answer came all the same: the wailing of the proximity alarms, complete with spinning amber lights. He was on his feet with his hand was on his gun before the cog door opened, revealing not an interloper or an alien threat, but Ianto, wearing denims and trainers without socks, and a hoodie with no shirt beneath, and it took Jack a moment to identify what was unusual about his appearance, and why it seemed almost as if he were standing in front of him naked.

"I thought I told you to sleep in," Jack said, by way of a greeting.

"You did." Ianto shrugged, looking by turns both tentative and determined. "I had to come back."

"Why?"

There was no suspicion in his voice because there was no ulterior motive in Ianto's discomfited stance. It wasn't even a even a question, really; it was just a word to keep silence at bay. But Ianto was already in motion before he responded, covering the ground between them in broad strides, and Jack started when warm hands molded against his head, the pads of thumbs pressed up against his temples.

"For this," Ianto said, and kissed him, awkward and clumsy, like every first kiss ever was. It wasn't their first kiss, though. Hell, it wasn't even their first kiss in the last _twelve hours_, but it was the first kiss that had been both a demand and a prelude, and behind the press of lips and the clash of teeth and the slick of tongue was Ianto, just Ianto, telling him without words that he would not stop, that he would not back down, that he would not be put off again . That he needed this-- that they both did-- and that he shouldn't have had to ask for it.

So Jack gave himself to it, tasted the chemical mint of Ianto's toothpaste and felt sweetness and sorrow surging within him, while Ianto maneuvered him slowly back to the couch. He asked him to sit by gently dropping his hands to Jack's shoulders, gentle pressure from strong hands, and then straddled his lap. The thorough, careful kiss didn't stop, but it didn't progress to anything more, either; Ianto didn't seem inclined to hurry. He pressed his lips almost chastely to the corners of Jack's mouth, nuzzled his cheek, and they breathed together, in and out, for an attenuated moment before his tongue beckoned Jack deeper. His hands never strayed below Jack's shoulders, but danced along the contour of his jaw and chased the short hairs on the back of his neck until he shivered.

"Come back, Jack," he whispered, moist and warm and alive in Jack's ear. "We need you here."

The words were like the thread of light that called him back every time he died, a strange frisson along his synapses that heralded the fierce burn of oxygen flooding back into his lungs. The kisses weren't just about Jack, or just about Ianto, or even about Jack _and_ Ianto, although that was all part and parcel; they were about bringing Jack home, bringing him back to where he needed to be, so that they could all do what they must.

"There's so much I've forgotten," he admitted, straining to keep his voice from breaking. Ianto didn't speak or even react. He rested his head on Jack's shoulder and waited patiently for him to continue, as if knowing his silence would be rewarded.

"All I could think about was Gray."

"Not surprising," Ianto remarked, smoothing Jack's collar.

"I remembered John before I remembered you." He was glad he couldn't see Ianto's expression. It was difficult enough to listen to him stiffly swallow. "I remembered his face, and then that we had been--" He hesitated.

"--Lovers."

"Partners. And then I remembered his name. And yours. And Gwen's. But I couldn't remember _why_... I couldn't remember what else I was here to do, except to stop Gray."

"Yes, well, that was the primary objective."

Jack's breath exited him in a slow hiss, and his head fell to rest on the back of the sofa. He scanned the arc of the vaulted ceiling with his gaze, saw the crazing on every old tile, the tiny superficial cracks in the veneer demarcating territories of age and wear.

"All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death," he sighed in a voice thick with irony, and Ianto made a noise of amusement.

  
"That's a little heavy-handed even for you, sir." He pulled away just long enough to shuck his hoodie. His body was broad and solid and youthful. "What else have you forgotten?"

"I never forgot _sex_, if that's what you're worried about," Jack chuckled, as though that were explanation enough. He traced the whorls of hair on Ianto's chest, luring him back down. "Now, _that_ would be a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions."

"Greek, I should think." He could feel Ianto's grin against his throat.

He closed his eyes, letting his hands rest on Ianto's thighs and refusing to contemplate the engaging shift of muscle and flesh. "Ianto, I am... damaged."

"Yes," Ianto agreed with a sigh, climbing off his lap and settling on the couch beside him. "Clearly. Profoundly, even." He wove their fingers together. "Look, Jack... when I was six or seven, my father took me to the Electro to see _Old Yeller_. Do you know that one?" Jack shook his head. "It's about a boy who has to put down his dog after it catches rabies. I cried for days after." He leaned in very earnestly. "Anyway, if you think it would help, I _will_ take you out back and shoot you."

God bless this boy for still being a smartass. "_Damaged_, Ianto, not rabid."

"Still, the offer stands."

Jack opened his mouth for a retort but no words followed. His mind had already flown, chasing after bits of data that flickered behind his eyes like frames of a film. The Electro... silent movies... Night Travelers... the carny.

_The carny_.

"Was I in a carnival?" he wondered aloud, more to himself than to Ianto, amused by the modulation of his own voice.

Ianto wasn't thrown by the non sequitor. "You were. Sometime in the early 20th century. And you had twin acrobat boyfriends who taught you astounding feats of flexibility. You may have forgotten, but I assure you I haven't. The memory of your practical demonstration lives on, if only in my mind."

Jack laughed a real and honest laugh at that, feeling something within himself let go. What he had forgotten either he would eventually remember or he wouldn't, but every minute was a torch to illuminate the darkness, an item to save and savor in some other future. For each loss, he could create new comforts. Starting now. It didn't take much coaxing to bring Ianto in line, to coordinate four long limbs along the length of the couch, for his hand to seek refuge in its place in the small of Ianto's back.

A kiss... It was such a simple thing, really, and when Jack's eyes watered with the simplicity of it all, Ianto thumbed the moisture swiftly away, his expression never changing, and Jack was filled with wonder and with gratefulness and kissed him back with a degree of intensity he had been afraid he no longer possessed, hungry now for light and life and reconnection. When he opened himself, accepted what Ianto had so generously offered, the universe rewarded him.

_Annika Farish_.

The name churned with the rhythm of Ianto's tongue against his. The words were meaningless at first-- _Annika Farish_\-- until his mind unlocked a glimpse of wheaten plaits above the sand-drab garb of the Boeshane: the first girl he ever kissed. A bright summer afternoon, racing her to the edge of the western dunes to see if the ibis eggs had hatched. She ran faster, beat him there. So lovely and alive in her victory, so overjoyed by the awkward, featherless hatchlings, mouths open and straining. He had kissed her, and she had looked so perfectly, gorgeously stunned that he had kissed her again.

_Annika Farish. I remember._

He felt the warmth of Ianto's legs through the denim, felt Ianto's erection, solid but undemanding against his hip. _Micah Dorn_. He pressed an open palm to Ianto's chest and felt the strong, solid beating of his heart beneath the skin. Ianto sighed, just a little, and reached for him.

_Micah Dorn._ The boy he'd slept with, four years later, hiking near the Ventish Cliffs on the outskirts of the refugee camp with two moons rising behind them. In the lambent light they had been more than just two survivors of the Slaughter of the Boeshane piecing together the remnants of their lives. Dark eyes fringed by dark lashes, coal-black hair that curled around Jack's fingers. The weight of Ianto's body brought Micah back, though his firm, confident touch was nothing like Micah's desperate, untutored hands. For a transient moment they shared space in his mind.

Each stroke pulled with it an untethered name: _Kano... Ultri... Greg... Estelle... Michael... Jarek... Algy._ A glimpse of Ianto's face as he turned his head recalled a feature of another: a friend or a rival, an acquaintance or a colleague or a lover. The nubby upholstery of the couch brought back the texture of a uniform. The cadence of Ianto's breathing and the little murmurs that gathered in his throat summoned flashes of time, of disembodied hands, of disconnected voices. Every recollection became an echo in reverse, the inverted doppler shift of sound returning through a vacuum. The perseverance of memory was almost too much, too bright, and it was completely unexpected.

"Thank you," he whispered brokenly, feeling a trace of stubble when he drew a knuckle over Ianto's cheek.

Ianto gave him a little half-smile but couldn't quite hold his eyes. "_Dim problem._" He said it as if it were nothing, an off-hand acknowledgment, not knowing that it was so much more.

  
Jack still couldn't remember, quite, what it all meant before-- what, precisely, he and Ianto were to each other. If it were serious or sport, if it had been about comfort or caring or something different, if it had been all of these things or none of them. Maybe that didn't matter now. Maybe it was enough to know that he had been given a gift. A gift he chose, now, to accept with both hands.

  
"Kiss me again, Ianto." A prelude and a demand.

  
But Ianto was already in motion, anticipating his request, giving Jack what he needed before he even knew he needed it-- because that was what Ianto did. And Jack smiled against Ianto's mouth, because he remembered.


End file.
